The Theater Loop

Who's the writer behind the wrestling?

October 16, 2009|By Chris Jones, TRIBUNE CRITIC

"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" -- the wrestling-themed, politically aware drama that's pumping up audiences at the Victory Gardens Theater -- is a red-hot new play. Incredibly, it is also the very first full-length play that Kristoffer Diaz has seen produced.

So who is this guy who can create a new script that gets theater-loving Chicago so riled up?

He is 32. He was born in Yonkers, N.Y. (his family is of Puerto Rican descent) and had been living for the last few years in New York City. He is a playwright for Chicago's Teatro Vista and currently resides in Minneapolis, where he is a Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights' Center, a Minneapolis incubator of new American plays. And he happened to submit a script to something Victory Gardens is calling the Ignition Festival, an endeavor aimed at diversifying its coterie of affiliated writers. "This is my first world premiere," Diaz said by phone earlier this week. "I guess I spent seven years in the development rounds."

Seven years! Go and see this play, and tell me if you think it should have taken seven years for this talent to hit the mainstage.

But Diaz' situation is not unusual. There are many festivals and residencies for young playwrights, but not full productions.

The abstract notion of the Ignition Festival didn't excite me much -- I tend to be leery of such grant-friendly endeavors for the dreary, politically correct plays they often produce. But if a play like "Chad Deity" results, then I admit I was wrong. And to its great credit, Victory Gardens didn't just workshop the play, it did a full mainstage production.

"Chad Deity" seems to me to have remarkable commercial potential, not least because it's one of those plays that let the audience have their proverbial cake and eat it. It's a bit like watching a documentary on the semiotics of Hollywood starlets. There is full-on wrestling to enjoy, and more than enough intellectual cover to claim you're at a play with profound views on global interdependence. In fact, you are.

Diaz says this contradiction is at the root of why he wrote the play in the first place.

"I used to like watching wrestling until this friend of mine really called me out on it," Diaz said. "'You're a smart guy,' she said, 'how could you watch that?' And so I found myself trying to justify all the sexism, racism, homophobia."

And thus he wrote a thinking person's play on the topic. With body slams. Smart fellow.

Now, even though it would make this story better, it wouldn't be true to characterize Diaz as a writing grunt who came from nowhere. He signed with William Morris pretty quickly after graduating from New York University. He is known in dramaturgical circles. But as a casual read of his ecstatic Tweets reveals, he's young and fresh enough to be very excited by a hit.

So what's next for this play?

According to Jan Kallish, the new executive director of the Gardens and a woman with an extensive background in commercial theater, numerous Broadway and nonprofit producers have been coming to see the show. "It will happen for this play," Kallish said. "The question is just what's the right path." Straight to Broadway? Off-Broadway? Via another regional theater?

"They are telling me they don't need a star," Kallish said. "They are saying that Kristoffer Diaz is the star."

Kallish has to deal with one significant problem. Before opening the play, Victory Gardens gave permission to the InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia and the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis to produce their own productions of the play this season. That was fine with Diaz, of course, and it is indicative of the generous spirit in which Victory Gardens has always been run. But it is less than ideal when you are trying to protect the artists involved in your premiere production of a hit play.

"That decision to allow further productions at small theaters was made before I came," Kallish said, "but we are the theater with the rights to option the show in New York. This is the premiere production, and this is the one with which New York producers have to deal."